Watch Your Back...

...this could be following you. As you no doubt have guessed, this pic is taken from Doomkart. Three different angles of this \'driving imp\' are yet available : a good way to celebrate the opening of the site where you will find more information about this surprising project. I can\'t wait for the spider...

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Noone can honestly say that their cart mods (like Quake Rally) weren't prompted by Mario Kart. There's no shame in that, it was an incredible game. But to the designers, I have a few requests, or advice:

Arcade games are founded on the principle of making money. Games make less money when only a small group of people actually win, and thus arcade game designers apparently stumbled upon a miraculous lie many years ago. "Let's taint the fairness of the competitive aspect, so that wins are distributed more evenly through the set of players. With more people winning, more people will be spending money."

This did NOT start at racing games. It started, I personally believe, at Street Fighter. CE and later HF (partially designed by a fan) marks the point at which characters which were simpler (requiring less actual reaction to the enemy's actions) were made equal in power to the others. The effect upon skilled players was both miniscule and largely unnoticed, since the factors that influence high level play have very little bearing on normal play, and vice versa. The fact was that for ~95% of players, it was an automatic handicap to pick a character other than Ken+Ryu.

But it continued, not only in all fighting games, but also into racing games. The idea was simple, simply give a speed boost to anyone who falls behind. No matter how poorly you perform at any point in the race, you have a chance of catching up and winning. Once again, this distributes wins more evenly through the set of players, since chaos plays a large role in the result. (Racing well consistently, or at any particular point in the race does not directly affect the outcome.)

What bearing does this have on your work? Balancing factors, which soften mistakes, or penalize skillful play, are FUNDAMENTALLY unfair and immoral.

I'm not trying to say you can make a perfect racing game. You can't. But you can sidestep obvious blunders like giving an advantage to someone who makes an early mistake. They lost the game by making that early mistake, and the game should deliver that result to them.

Nor am I trying to say that skill is clearly defined, and that the winner of the game clearly understands all factors that lead to his success or failure. However, skill should never be intentionally penalized.

If you want another example, look at the Quake series. Why isn't it as good as Doom? One reason is that you can't take full damage from your own rockets. Sure, you could fire them carefully from safe distance. But why bother when you can just hold the trigger down and aim in the general direction of the enemy's feet? Isn't there an armor within easy reach?